Rwanda: Rwandans Prepare for First Post-Genocide Elections, 3/26/99

RWANDA: Rwandans prepare for first post-genocide elections

NAIROBI, 26 March (IRIN) - For the first time since
the 1994 genocide, Rwandans will go to the polls on
Monday to elect local officials.

The elections will be held at "cellule" level,
to be followed by "secteur" level polls two
days later. Rwanda is made up of 12 prefectures, which
are divided into 155 communes. These are further sub-divided
into 1,531 administrative "secteurs" and
then into 8,987 "cellules".

"This grassroot election is a test of whether the
country should go ahead with elections at national
level, or just stop there," a regional analyst
told IRIN on Friday.

The national government is a coalition, led by the Rwandan
Patriotic Front.

The Rwandan authorities have said the elections, described
as "participatory democracy", are aimed at
"empowering the local populations to decide their
own destiny".

Polling will be for an individual - using the "queuing
system" - rather than a political party, and critics
have pointed out that voters may be initimidated by
the lack of secrecy as they will have to line up behind
the candidate of their choice.

"There is a risk that the election system could
be hijacked by sympathisers of the genocide, which
could bring about a backlash from genocide survivors,"
one analyst told IRIN.

Other observers have said people will simply vote for
the person closest to the authorities.

Rwanda's Local Government Minister Desire Nyandwi told
the Rwanda News Agency that the country's previous
election experience was "sad, limited and ethnically-based".
Since the 1994 genocide, in which extremist Hutus slaughtered
around 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus, the country
has been undergoing a slow reconstruction, against
the background of renewed extremist threats.

Nyandwi urged voters to elect "competent, capable"
officials, not based on ethnicity, religion or politics.